Paradigm Persona and the search for Goldie-dacs, the right source matters!

As one of the top Paradigm Personas dealers, we have been following with some hilarity a particular poster who is going on all the Paradigm Personas threads and wiillfully lambasting the speakers in the pursuit of making his speaker choice the superior performer.

After reading his posts a few points we would like to point out:

Every loudspeaker in this industry is not perfect.

Although speaker X may do certain things like much more expensive loudspeakers it all comes down to personal taste and what you value over other qualites, imaging, tonality, bass response, etc.

Just because a "dealer" or rep has setup a system doesn’t mean that that is a good setup.

Many dealers don’t have the right matching gear, correctly sized sound room or experience with the product to make a great sounding setup.


Some background, Audio Doctor our compnay was founded by me, a man with over 30 years of professional audio sales and design experience. In the trenches for 30 years you get to hear a lot of different gear and play with many combinations of prodoucts you learn a lot about system matching, your also learn a lot by working at two ot the largest and most prolific high end dealers in NYC.

Our approach is to start with the loudspeakers, then find matching electronics, and cabing and then use the choice of digital or analog components flavor the sound to create the overall result.

Our reference Persona setup is one of the best in the country, a blending of T+A electronics, Enkelin Cables, Audio Magic power conditioning, room tunning and system tunning, Critical Mass rack and footers, NCF boosters, etc.

With the right source this system has been magical and with the wrong source good but not inspiring or when thing s were really off just plain bad.

We have had a love hate relationship with Aqua Hifi, we love the overall sound, and the 100% modularity, except that the Formula XHD had a lot going for it, huge soundstage, good depth, good overall resolution but had a bit of an opaque quality to it in the upper midrange that precluded the dac from being to our ears the right match to this lofty system.

Then we heard about the new analog board that is supposed to transform the Aqua. We ordered the board which looked identical to the previous board, so we were initially concerned. Then after firing up the dac, wow that sounds different the new Formula now went from being recesssed to being much more forward, after a few days of playing the dac now sounded spectacular and digital started really giving analog a run for its money.

The point of this story is many times audiophiles throw the baby out with the bath water. sometimes, just changing your dac, transport, cables, adding power conditioning, repositioning, footers etc can totally transform a system.

We went from a really expensive system that wasn’t making magic to one that was just by chaning a board in the dac and again just by looking at the board there was no apparent differences, so many people might have been skeptical

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Persona and Aqua dealers